Preface
Who This Book Is For
This book is for anyone who understands the importance of the customer experience and is looking to take the next steps toward delivering truly great experiences. It offers a framework for how to get your organization structured to be able to deliver upon the experiences you want to provide. The book allows you to find your position on the stepwise transition toward experience centricity, and guides you in what you can do as an organization to make the next step up.
Why I Wrote This Book
I have been fixated upon delivering memorable customer experiences for 30 years and have come to understand that this is an organizational imperative, rather than something that can be fixed through a single project mandate. As a voracious reader, I found myself increasingly frustrated that many books talked about the importance of the customer experience, but few actually helped you design these experiences. Not only this, but they neglected to describe how you should transform your organization to deliver the great experiences you want to deliver. I kept finding myself working with leadership teams who were saying, “We know this is important, but how can we do this? How can we design the company to be able to comfortably deliver great experiences?” There, the literature comes up short, and that is the reason why this book was written.
I am a join-the-dots kind of person, seeing connections, patterns, and trajectories all around me. I have seen several waves of technology and organizational paradigms come and go, and this got me asking a fundamental question:
The customer experience has been important for many years, but what comes after the customer experience?
This question bugged me for a long time because the answer was always more and better experiences! However, I recognized that providing more,better experiences requires organizational capabilities. Finally, I realized that the customer experience is not a wave that we will pass through, but instead a trajectory with an endpoint. Organizations compete on customer experience, and the endpoint of this trajectory is when an organization makes the customer experience their “reason to exist.” That is, they become an experience-centric organization. Suddenly a lot of dots came into focus as I realized that we are on the edge of a step change in terms of how the customer experience is viewed. This has enormous consequences for business in the next decade and I hope that as a reader, you will see its relevance for your organization. I strongly believe that it is relevant and important for the future of service. I sincerely hope you find it useful, and that it arms you to engage in the competitive landscape of customer experience today.
How This Book Is Organized
This book is divided into three parts about the why and how of the experience-centric organization.
Part I focuses on leadership and presents the case for the experience-centric organization, the stepwise transformation toward it, and organizational characteristics needed to become experience-centric.
Part II is about the how of the experience-centric organization. It goes into detail about the customer experience itself and how to design for it.
Part III presents two guest chapters that describe new, evolving areas of competition and competencies that you should aspire to develop,once you have become experience-centric.
Each part gives you the knowledge to understand your position on the experience-centricity maturity scale, and provides valuable information about what you can do to transform as an organization toward experience centricity.
Part I: The What and the Why
Chapter 1: The Experience-Centric Organization
This introductory chapter summarizes the whole book. It starts by explaining why the customer experience is now the main arena of competition and how this will intensify and evolve during the next decade.
The chapter then introduces the experience-centric organization as the endpoint of this trajectory, and explains what this means for an organization.
Chapter 2: Five Steps to Becoming Experience-Centric
Chapter 2 presents a five-step transformation model that outlines the path organizations usually take on their transformational journey toward experience centricity. This allows you to benchmark your own position, and begin thinking about a transformation roadmap.
Chapter 3: The Structure of the Experience-Centric Organization: The Wheel of Experience Centricity
This chapter describes the underlying structure of the experience-centric organization. It identifies key parts of the organization and their role in supporting the design and delivery of memorable customer experiences. Understanding this structure, and how the parts fit together, is key to unlocking the potential of the experience-centric organization.
Chapter 4: The Core Behaviors of the Experience-Centric Organization
How does an organization behave when it has become experience-centric? This chapter gives you an answer, describing the key behaviors of an experience-centric organization. This allows you to identify behaviors you already exhibit, and those that you need to develop.
Chapter 5: Organizing for Experience Centricity
Great experiences are provided by the whole organization, where everyone has their part. This chapter describes how you can structure the organization and develop an organizational logic that is focused upon delivering truly great experiences.
Part II: The How of Great Experiences
Chapter 6: Starting with the Experience
To be able to deliver great experiences, you need to know what a customer experience is and how customers experience your offerings. This chapter includes recent knowledge gained from neuropsychology about how we experience the world, and what makes for a great customer experience. It also describes how you can use this knowledge to design for memorable customer experiences.
Chapter 7: Experiential Translation: From Experiential DNA to Customer Experience
This chapter introduces the concept of experiential DNA and describes how it evolves from your brand DNA. It shows how to identify your experiential DNA and how you can use it as a platform to develop relevant and desirable offerings that will deliver extraordinary customer experiences.
Chapter 8: Experience Fulfillment: Designing the Experiential Journey
A key thing about the customer experience is that value is created through use. Until a product or service is used, the customer only has expectations, and you have only made promises. This makes fulfilling experiential expectations vital to the organization. This chapter describes how experiences are fulfilled together with customers through interactions with the touchpoints of the experiential journey over time. It then describes how you can become expert at experience fulfillment.
Part III: Going Further
Chapter 9: Design for Meaning
Chapter 9 takes you deeper into how to get a black belt in experience centricity, by understanding the deeper meanings that customers attach to their experiences. It goes into detail about how we instinctively read meaning into an experience and shows how, contrary to many initiatives about individually tailored experiences, collective experiences are more memorable and important to us.
Chapter 10: Trendslation
Customer relationships go two ways. As customers develop a relationship with you and your services, they extend the personality and behavioral characteristics related to your organization into expectations related to the broader world of culture and even politics. Chapter 10 introduces trendslation, an approach to help you become a proactive leader in this process by translating cultural trends into experiences.
Chapter 11: Conclusion
The conclusion wraps up the book and looks back at the chapters as a whole.
Chapter 12: Further Reading
This book summarizes the knowledge and experience from many different areas. It can only scratch the surface of some areas, however, so this chapter offers plenty of suggestions for you to go further.
Deviations from the Script
At different points in the book, you will find text boxes with different symbols. These give different kinds of in-depth detail related to the chapter, and you can choose to follow them or just hop over them.
An academic deep dive
Related and interesting
Tools and approaches
Examples from real life
Interview
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Acknowledgments
Although this book has my name on the cover, it is the result of collaboration with a great many organizations and people during the past years. First off, a big thank you to Judith Gloppen and Berit Lindquister, who encouraged me to work on this, when I developed the term experience-centric organization and who worked together with me on this path some years ago. Second, thanks to Ted Matthews and Claire Dennington, who not only have guest chapters in this book but also are part of the R&D team at AHO, working with design and experience-rich services. I would also like to thank the Norwegian Research Council, particularly Lise Sund, who has embraced the role of design in service innovation and helped finance the Centre for Service Innovation (CSI), which helped produce this book. Finally, thanks to AHO’s Institute for Design (IDE).
To the reviewers, who helped me get my message across, thank you for sharpening the message and the book. I hope to repay the favor to you. To the supportive people at O’Reilly, who helped get the book out, a thank you for your help and patience. And a large tip of the hat to Graham, who developed the layout and illustrations for the book, and who put up with the continual frustrations of text changes at the last minute.
Then, over to family. To Charlotte, who has encouraged me and been a supportive home editor, and to my four kids, who have listened positively and with a smile when I have gone on and on about the book: you are all wonderful, and I promise to now shut up about it.